GeoCities, once the Internet's third most visited domain, will be shutting down on Oct. 26, taking with it thousands of user home pages and decades of data. All that information will be history.... Fortunately, some historians are making sure it's not lost to the annals of time.

Founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, what is now Yahoo GeoCities was one of the first services to offer an easy way for early Internet surfers to publish their own Web pages. Whereas most hosting options of the 1990s were expensive, thus limiting their use to more entrepreneurial pursuits, GeoCities' free hosting space became the home for thousands of sites built around thematically oriented "neighborhoods": conservation, fashion, military, sports, finance, travel, and mo